Aid Starts Entering Gaza Through U.S.-Built Pier, but Officials Say It Isn’t Enough

Trucks of humanitarian aid began moving ashore into Gaza early Friday via a temporary pier built by the U.S. military, the first supplies of aid to be sent into the enclave by sea in two months. But the new shipments of food and other supplies fall far short of what humanitarian groups say is needed to meet the staggering levels of hunger and deprivation in Gaza.

A day earlier, the U.S. military said it had anchored the floating pier and causeway to the beach in Gaza, a key step in completing a maritime corridor that the Pentagon announced in March. U.S. officials and international aid groups have said that sea shipments can only supplement deliveries through land crossings, not replace them.

No U.S. troops entered Gaza on Friday, the U.S. military said, emphasizing that it was providing only logistical support for delivery of the supplies, which were donated by a number of countries and organizations.

The war-torn territory of 2.2 million civilians is more reliant than ever on humanitarian aid. The devastation after seven months of Israeli bombardment, strict Israeli inspections and restrictions on crossing points had already severely limited what could enter. And over the past week and a half, since Israel began a military assault around the city of Rafah, the flow of supplies through the main land crossings in southern Gaza had been reduced to a trickle.

Aid agencies continued to report increasingly dire conditions in Gaza. Janti Soeripto, president and chief executive of Save the Children U.S., told The New York Times on Friday, “We have never ever seen anything like this anywhere in the planet.”